Travels with my Donkey

back to the side and he's stopped but all the skin has been shredded off the base of my fingers. Oh my great God. Oh God. Oh.
    For some time I stood panting in the gravelly roadside weeds, arms extended, palms up, raw flesh pulsing at the sun. Hanno had warned me of the overdeveloped sensitivity of a donkey's peripheral vision, how even a tiny and innocuous rearward swish or flash could trigger a panicked stampede. I turned round and surveyed my shedded load: 50 yards downhill, beyond the ejected bowl and panniers, lay the beach mat. I hadn't even noticed it working loose and falling, but Shinto dramatically had. Yet now this under-brained wazzock stood mildly before me, aware that he was suddenly in a different place but no more than slightly curious as to the apparently reflex response that had brought him there. Donkey see, donkey do.
    Hands swaddled in elasticated support bandage, I heaved the luggage over a roadside gate, opened it and elbowed Shinto into the field beyond. I should let him graze and rest for at least two hours at lunch-time, Hanno had said, and though such a break would soon seem tediously unthinkable, on that day it wasn't nearly enough. Only 10 kilometres covered and already I had faced ruthless examination as pilgrim, man and arse.
    I constructed and ate salami sandwiches with raw materials acquired in St Jean; I lay down in the cool, high, butter-cupped grass; I slept. Shinto was lashed to an oak tree with a clumsily over-engineered knot the size of a bunched fist, and when I woke up he was lying down too. We looked at each other and I held up a bandaged hand in mollification. 'Let's kind of start again,' I said. 'Let's pretend we're just setting out.' And with a roll and a complex levering of legs, Shinto jumped to his feet. His ears sprang forward and his nostrils flared with eager resolve. Let's do it, I thought, then said. Shinto held my gaze, and as I walked purposefully towards him that great flanged cock popped out of its sheath and arched lazily down to his knee.
    Whatever the complexities of our personal relationship, that afternoon Shinto and I began to forge a professional understanding. The early pace had evidently been overambitious, and slowing to about 3.5 kilometres per hour he settled into a rhythm. I stood by Shinto's shoulder and talked to him — I'd been told that donkeys thrived on vocal company — and when that earned me an alarmed glance from a cyclo-pilgrim whose approach I hadn't detected, I sang to him.
    The trees thinned as we rose, depriving us of shade. Sweat was beginning to blot through to the outside of Shinto's saddle blanket: I filled the washing-up bowl from a roadside culvert, and watched in mild awe as he mechanically siphoned up its contents, 10 litres ingested in half a minute without a single slurp. Two dogs guarding some roadside hovel strained against their chains at Shinto's approach and let forth a furious volley of slavering barks. Raised on a farm alongside two vast canines, Shinto was majestically dismissive of this performance, and when as we passed he angled a bored glance at them they bolted off in silent terror. Dogs were a perennial camino blight — some guides rank pilgrim villages in terms of canine threat — but it was now clear that with Shinto at my side they would cause me no discomfort. Good man, Shints. I think I may have patted his neck.
    And his good work was not done for the day. As we neared the summit I spotted my first fellow pedestrian, a woman of middle years standing by the road, a wits-end expression on her moist red face. Her name was Petronella, she was Dutch, and she'd had enough. Those were tears mingled in with the sweat; her rucksack was too heavy and the gradient too steep. I propped an elbow on the saddle and caressed my stubble in manly rumination. 'Well,' I said, in a cocksure drawl that suggested the next words might be 'little lady', 'I think we might just be able to help you out there.'
    Shinto seemed to enjoy the additional company, if not the additional luggage. He laboured audibly up to the pass summit at Ibañeta, then having crested it surrendered himself to gravity for a memorably capricious descent. It was like that circus train in Dumbo huffing 'I think I can, I think I can' up hills, and 'I thought I could, I thought I could' as he barrelled down the other side. One moment I was squinting at a plaque marking the proximate last stand of Charlemagne's rear guardsman Roland, and the next my head was